Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday August 11, 2014 @05:08PM
from the closing-the-doors dept.

mdsolar writes EDF Energy, the British subsidiary of the French state-controlled utility, said on Monday that it was shutting down three nuclear reactors and that a reactor with a fault that has been shut down since June would remain so. The facilities, which are being investigated as a precaution, generate nearly a quarter of nuclear capacity in Britain. The British Office for Nuclear Regulation said that there had been no release of radioactive material and no injuries. Industry experts did not anticipate much effect on electricity supplies or prices in the short term. EDF said that over the next few days it would idle a second reactor at the facility, Heysham 1, in northwest England. The company said it would also shut down two other reactors of similar design at Hartlepool in northeast England to investigate whether they had the same flaws.

Yeah, but like you said, the present neocon government is willing to give HUGE corporate welfare to make new nuclear reactor plans viable.

I used to be entirely pro-nuclear on a scientific basis. Now I see how humans behave in practice when it comes to the trade-off between safety and profit/reputation. I see how much nuclear power is really reverse Hollywood accounting, where you hide how much of the real cost is borne by government. And I would prefer a transition from fossil directly to renewable, even if that means overriding the whiny bitches who somehow think fracking is safer and more economic than wind because you can't actually SEE what's happening underground.

True, but this seems to apply to all large scale power generation, whether it's land for hydro or windmills (and screw the people living there who have to put up with it or move) or cash for nuclear. To say nothing of externalizing the environmental costs.

It's called subsidizing (if you disagree with it) or incentivising (if you do).

We just had two major off shore wind farm projects blocked on the Norfolk coast (thats Norfolk, UK) because of "environmental concerns", and one fell through a few years back because of NIMBYs not wanting the power cable link up to go through their general area.

The entire thing is a joke - even renewable energy projects run into major "environmental" issues:/

'Renewable' fuels are a misnomer. The sun will run out of fuel too sometime. When that happens you can forget about solar panels or windmills.

Of course that's in geological timescales so it does not matter. There is enough nuclear fission fuel to last for thousands of years so that is irrelevant as well. As for oil we have been using it for over a century by now and it seems we haven't ran out of it yet.

This is why the world "renewable" is such a misnomer. Oil is also a renewable resource. It formed naturally on the Earth and is continuously replenishing itself. Some say the replenishing rate is higher than our current consumption rate but that does not make it any less renewable. Same thing for coal.

Both solar pv and windmills are powered by the energy of the sun so they are both ways of harnessing a natural fusion power source.

We aren't going to run out of fossil fuels at any time. They will get harder and more expensive to acquire, and therefore production will go down over time, but there will always be some left that is not economically recoverable until the price goes up. Moreover, getting those fuels out of the ground is going to require more and more energy. If we keep doing this long enough, we'll be mining and drilling at a net loss in energy.

So, although technically we aren't going to run out of them, we will for p

I used to be entirely pro-nuclear on a scientific basis. Now I see how humans behave in practice when it comes to the trade-off between safety and profit/reputation. I see how much nuclear power is really reverse Hollywood accounting, where you hide how much of the real cost is borne by government. And I would prefer a transition from fossil directly to renewable

And could you explain how your "renewables" will be significantly cheaper than nuclear? Or not take up shitloads of space for the same amount of p

Yeah, but like you said, the present neocon government is willing to give HUGE corporate welfare to make new nuclear reactor plans viable.

Given that Nuclear power is the best way to reduce CO2 emissions, wouldn't that make sense?http://www.scientificamerican.... [scientificamerican.com] Check out the silver consumption of Solar... silver mining is terrible for the environment.Keep in mind the graph doesn't track CO2 output of burning the fuel itself. So Coal, oil, natural gas and biomass fuels would have huge CO2 impacts. Biomass consumes much of what it produces, but it still imbalances CO2 levels throughout the seasons (spikes in the winter, troughs in the summer) H

Solar don't necessarily needs silver. There are different designs. Plus keep an eye on new battery technologies and smart grid. Solar will surely be the main energy resource for quite sometime. Even if nuclear will be used, there are cheaper and extremely secure(leaking wise) reactor designs with nearly no unusable radioactive waste. They are smaller though.

My BS detector went off when I saw that graph, so I had to actually read the paper... and now I understand the graph and it's not at all what it seems to be.

See that giant circle for silver? That doesn't mean "a massive amount of silver", or even "a massive amount of environmental impact from silver". These circles are sized proportionally to how much more of a resource is needed than in the current generation mix, if all power came from that source. Since almost no silver is used in the current generation

Indeed that 'Scientific' American graph reeks of bias against renewables.

I'd like to see their explanation of how uranium doesn't require the largest amount of energy to process or that somehow the nuclear industry doesn't use much uranium relative to all of the other industries.

Also noted that they make weasely comments against solar and wind but not coal etc (growing crops for fuel is retarded outright).

I'm getting sick of all the bad science coming out of supposedly good institutions. There's been the BS

Indeed, who could ever present such slanderous accusations? Oh wait, how about actual grid measurements [imgur.com]? (Aggregate German whole-grid performance numbers from Dec 2013 broken down by source.)

Part of the problem is that without government incentives/subsidies, companies will go for the highest-profit methods of power generation available.

Which means that the only plants built will be fossil fuel plants.

I don't believe that we currently have the technology to fully switch to renewable and won't for a few decades. Nuclear provides that bridge - Ideally after one more generation of nuclear reactors (modern designs are FAR safer than the existing ones) we'll have the storage technology to properly

Part of the problem is that fossil fuels have massive externalities, which distort the market much like government subsidies do. As far as I can tell, nukes and renewables have much less in the way of externalities than coal.

EDF expects to miss its own deadline for deciding whether to build Britain’s first new nuclear plant in a generation, the Telegraph can disclose.

The French energy giant announced in October that it planned to take a final investment decision on the £16bn Hinkley Point C plant by July, after striking a landmark subsidy deal with government.

But it now believes that an ongoing European Commission investigation into whether the subsidies are illegal state aid will not be fully resolved until autumn, forcing its decision on the Somerset plant back until then.

The delay could threaten EDF’s plans to deliver first power from the plant in 2023 – a timescale it had said was “subject to a final investment decision by July 2014”.

EDF has been at pains to insist it can deliver Hinkley “on time and on budget”, despite its Flamanville reactor in France being dogged by cost blowouts and years of delays.

At this phase of the project these works help to prepare the site ahead of the main construction following a final investment decision. These initial works include the construction of roundabouts, temporary construction roads and drainage works, all of which are reversible. Visit our community hub to see the planned works.

They appear to be building housing and beefing up the roads, but a final investment decision appears to have been postponed.

I think England is culturally tied to the idea of keeping the home fires burning which give nuclear power a kind of hold on them that technically it does not merit. That may explain the huge price they are willing to pay.

I think England is culturally tied to the idea of keeping the home fires burning which give nuclear power a kind of hold on them that technically it does not merit. That may explain the huge price they are willing to pay.

The English power consumption profile is winter-biased, and that's when loss of power can really cause trouble. Politicians think it is better (in electoral terms) to over-spend than to have the lights (and heating!) go out; they may be right on that.

The Navy seems to have this kind of thing covered. http://blogs.discovermagazine.... [discovermagazine.com] If the gas turbine is 60% efficient, then this will be nearly twice as efficient as a nuclear plant. And the wind resource is not lacking. "The United Kingdom has been estimated to have over a third of Europe's total offshore wind resource, which is equivalent to three times the electricity needs of the nation at current rates of electricity consumption." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W... [wikipedia.org]

The Navy likes its efficiency. And, the methane is a drop in replacement for natural gas. The UK already has a natural gas infrastructure. So, it all looks much much less expensive than nuclear power. The environmental impact is benign of course since it is carbon neutral.

You made the very basic error of comparing nameplate capacity. You also need to consider capacity factor, which for solar in UK latitudes is around 0.1 - 0.15, whereas the EPRs that they plan to construct here are 0.9. So taking that into account, your 13 GW utility scale solar suddenly shrinks to <2 GW, whereas the nuclear plant is still around 3 GW. So before we even get to dispatchability of the power source and seasonal loading, solar loses by about 1/3 to the most wildly overpriced nuclear power plant I've ever seen in my life. Next you need to consider that the nuclear plant is planned to operate for 60 years, whereas the solar plant is most likely going to need replacement after 30 or at most 40 years. Finally, the $27B cost of the plant seems to me to be wildly out of whack with what these very same reactors cost in places like China [wikipedia.org] (cheaper by about a factor of 4x). Meanwhile Russia is also building modern VVER-1200s [wikipedia.org] at an equivalent cost of 4x cheaper than the plant in the UK. Make of this what you will, but it appears to me that the western world is losing its industrial prowess and losing it fast.

I would agree that the regulatory environment in the west is hell-bent on killing any and all new projects, but you really can't blame them for being super-duper careful, as they have a hysterical public to deal with who perceive any failure, however small, as a catastrophe, thanks in large part due to media hype and fear mongering by news outlets and environmental groups. In Russia and China, meanwhile, the public realize that realistically it's either nuclear, with its occasional potential radiation relea

> IFR fuel is still solid fuel rodsAre you sure ? How is the core fuel be reprocessed with the fuel in solid fuel rods ? Will have to destroy / recreate the cladding before/after each reprocessing event ?Doesn't make much sense.The only design with an integral reprocessing facility I studied at a deep enough level was the Thorium LFTR and that uses the fuel molten with the primary coolant... So I wrongly assumed, but still it doesn't make sense vis-a-vis reprocessing.

In IFR the cladding is loose-fitting, so the spent fuel is extracted from that. Since it isn't oxidized but is instead in pure metallic form, no oxide reduction step by way of an acid bath is necessary. The fuel pellets are simply melted and gaseous fission products are driven off. Next the molten mass is placed in a molten salt bath and an electroplating process extracts uranium and plutonium in metallic form onto an electrode (along with a little bit of fission products - this is serves as radiation shiel

Air-cooled. Which is indeed a gas, but very different to the CO2-cooled reactors described here. Windscale was an air-cooled, open-loop plutonium production reactor designed in the 1940s. It didn't generate electricity and has very little relation to the later electricity-generating reactors.

Unsurprising after the Windscale Fire that nuclear power is unpopular in the UK

Windscale was 60 years ago, in an air-cooled open loop pile who's only purpose was to produce plutonium and other nuclear isotopes as quickly as possible and damn the consequences.

Most people now don't even remember what Windscale was or even recognise the name. Out of those that do, a lot of them understand the different between Windscale and their local nuclear power station.

To the best of my personal knowledge, nuclear power is not unpopular in the UK, Windscale or otherwise. If anything the attitude appears to be "Get on and build the damn things!" and "Why are we letting the French/Chinese build them, I remember when the UK used to build things!".

Taking that many GW-hrs of production offline for that length of time is a serious outage.Greater modularity would allow for a quicker ID of the scope of the problem, even if the total time to repair or replace would be greater.

He didn't say that. He said modular. As in, each turbine module should be separable from each reactor module. Within the reactor itself, you'd have separate modules that you could inspect or replace, rather than bringing the whole facility down for eight weeks. If you're looking at cooling issue, you take one cooling module down at a time rather than taking apart the whole facility.

Would be nice at the sub-unit level but take a look at a thermal power station to get some idea that the scale makes it impractical once you have enough steam to spin a turbine. Big turbines with lots of high pressure steam get the job done far better than little ones. Of course you could have something like a lot of little pebble bed reactors making steam in parallel on the boiler side making it possible to just shut down one reactor, but after the stuff is boiled it's pretty well the whole unit goes down for just about anything.

Notice that I used the word "unit". A thermal power station can be made up, for example, of eight units, with eight turbine rotors, eight boilers (nukes would include reactors at that bit) and each unit using half a cooling tower each. You can take 1/8 of the plant down without impacting on the rest and that's what's done with scheduled maintanance.However it looks like this situation is like grounding all of a type of aircraft when a fault is found, so it's thought of being serious enough to check out all the reactors of that type at once and being worth shutting down every unit of that type. So modularity is not going to save you so long as at least one part subject to the "recall" is required by each unit.

The French had this a few times and had to shut down all of their commercial nuclear power plants at once on occasion but it's not a nuclear thing, it's the drawback of a monoculture.

The French had this a few times and had to shut down all of their commercial nuclear power plants at once on occasion but it's not a nuclear thing, it's the drawback of a monoculture.

Actually, this is not entirely true. If the security concerns over nuclear weren't so high, you wouldn't have to shutdown everything, and vice versa even without monoculture, you may have to shutdown the whole industry if flaws in inspection rules are found (witness Japan for a recent example).

It's simple - consider when a type of aircraft is grounded and checjed as an example. Now apply that to a specific type of reactor or for a not necessarily nuclear example a specific model of turbine. A monoculture increases the impact of such a situation.

Of course I know what it means but the pressure and scales involved make it very unlikely to have that degree of redundancy at realistic capital costs. It's a process with stuff upstream and downstream.I suggest you read what I've written above instead of just skim until you hit a key word to get some idea why instead of getting all condescending about an issue outside of your area of awareness. I tried to clarify things without sounding like I was dumbing it down too much and being condescending so I wou

Modular means steam from one reactor core piped to different turbines,

Since everything runs at around full rated capacity that means you need a spare of every portion of the process to be able to do such a thing - so an entire spare unit. Does that make sense yet? If you've got an entire spare unit then you have the capacity to shut down the one with problems anyway instead of a bit at a time.That's why the mulitple inputs make little sense, if something's at 100% what do you do with the extra steam? You

That's pretty well how it is and has been for decades in thermal power generation. A turbine doesn't care what makes it's steam, just that there is enough of it. There's even solar pre-heating in at least one coal fired power station.

but you still kept on about "lots of little reactors" being a bad idea

With respect I suggested exactly that thing in parallel with the example of pebble bed was a good idea. Lose one and you still get enough steam to get som

These plants were built in the 70s, and have been running for quite a while. They are AGR models, very few build and troublesome compared to most of the PWR designs. Despite that, they have generated a bunch of power, and probably will continue to as soon as the issues are worked out.

These reactors are relatively new, "commissioned in 1983", but that's still over twenty years old. The main goals of reactor design are safety and efficiency. With that in mind I'm sure they've done quite a bit of design work on making these things more maintenance friendly. Especially since the shutdowns are precautionary after they found a problem at the first one. They're searching for something that may not even exist.

Taking that many GW-hrs of production offline for that length of time is a serious outage.

It's still summer here, so there's probably lots of space capacity elsewhere. Few homes have air conditioning, the outside temperature tomorrow is forecast to peak at 21C in London. August is the month with the lowest demand.

Correct. Sizewell B can load follow, but we (I work there) haven't done this for years. It is however getting more likely due to the increasingly unstable nature of the National Grid, partly due to lots of smaller generators of which the grid has no control over coming online (windfarms). I believe the AGRs can also load follow.
The nukes generate at baseload, full output, whenever they're on. Our frequency control is maintained by the coal and gas generators.

It wouldn't help in this case. The shutdown is precautionary until they can determine if the problem is systematic due to a design flaw or not. In a more modular system, they would still have to shut down all of the modules until they could make the determination.

a reactor with a fault that has been shut down since June would remain so

The reactor, in fact, doesn't have a fault. There was a potential issue identified in the heat exchanger at one unit, found during a routine check, and the others have been shut down early to allow the heat exchangers at those to also be checked earlier than scheduled.

As much as mdsolar wishes it was, this is in fact a non-issue. The system and safety protocols are working precisely as they were designed.

It's hardly a non-issue when you're taking gigawatt-hrs of baseload offline for 2 months.Granted, it's not such a big issue in summer but that's just dumb luck. This could just have easily happened in mid-winter although it would be much easier to keep a gas-cooled reactor cooled in February than in August.:-)

I once designed a huge display clock for the reception area of Heysham nuclear power station. The clock had a sweep second hand that traced out a ring of LEDs once per minute, and a counter that showed the number of days since the last industrial accident. The specification called for this counter to have just three digits, which frankly didn't inspire much confidence.

You are mis-representing the clock. It is common to have a clock for continuous days without an outage, 3 digits would be up to 999, which is well beyond the refueling cycle. Its a measure to show the results of their preventative maintenance and operations effectiveness, and quite impressive numbers are often achieved. Some plants do clocks for number of days without a workplace injury, which is typical of any industry, and also pretty much unheard of to go 999 days with the type of maintenance activities

I can assure you it was not for time between nuclear accidents, but don't let that little truth stop you from you from making a slant.

I never claimed it was. I designed the thing; it was pretty clear they meant industrial accident in the normal sense of someone cutting themselves, dropping a hammer on their foot, etc. Nevertheless it struck me as a strange thing to want to put on display, because no matter what value the display showed up to 999, it would either be misinterpreted (e.g. as a nuclear accid

It's not meant to be "impressive", it's simply meant to be honest. All the sites do it, and anyway, three years (~999 days) without an industrial accident leading to time off work is impressive for any large industrial site that employs about 600 full time staff and another 300 odd contractors.

a counter that showed the number of days since the last industrial accident. The specification called for this counter to have just three digits, which frankly didn't inspire much confidence.

I don't think you know what counts as an "industrial accident". You seem to think it means a Chernobyl or Three Mile Island. I have worked in such industries and a cook in the canteen cutting her hand with a potato peeler counts as an industial accident. I'm not exagerating. That did happen where I work and the fuss about that cut hand went on for days - we were called in to "refresher" safety lectures, circulars were sent round, we were sick of hearing about it. The cook herself was no doubt highly em

Although it seems like they've recognized and are addressing a minor engineering issue before it becomes a problem, it seems like this will be portrayed as another in a continuing series of black eyes for the nuclear alternative to our energy needs.

There is no present, perfect way to deliver the electricity those of us on the grid have come to appreciate. When you're talking about the mainstays of the grid's backbone (coal, crude, gas, hydroelectric, nuclear), none are generated without environmental consequence.

Continue to develop the renewables, but for fuck's sake, don't take nuclear off the table based on the performance of aging plants.

IF they address issues in a safe and responsible manner, they get slammed.If they ignore it, and a meltdown occurs, it's even worse.If they do what needs to be done to avoid a meltdown/accident, but don't tell anyone, they get accused of sweeping things under the rug.

Oh, and they get the Nimbitards all riled up if they decide to build new plants; despite in part, building the new plants to address the concerns raised by the NIMBY types over the old plants.

There are two issues unique to nuclear that case people not to want it.

1. The extreme cost. As you are probably aware, the UK government has had to guarantee well above the going rate for energy generated from new nuclear plants for their entire lifetimes just to get them built. Even so, only the Chinese are interested in doing it. Current plants were built by the government that literally could not give them away in the 80s when they were privatised, until it agreed to shoulder most of the costs of running and decommissioning them.

2. Single point of failure. As this event demonstrates problems with reactors can knock gigawatts off the grid for long periods of time. Other sources tend not to suffer from that kind of failure, and some sources like wind are extremely widely distributed and fault tolerant.

As for judging nuclear by the performance of ageing plants, the newer designs are not significantly better in any of these areas. We can see what other countries are building and they have all the same problems.

1. Yes but there are also benefits, in that nuclear produces low-CO2 base load reliably. In any developed economy, that ability to maintain a reliable base load is worth far more economically than the capex upfront cost.

2. If you're running your generating capacity so close to the edge that a single shutdown takes you below demand, you're doing it wrong anyway. Reactors are routinely shut down for inspection and refuelling anyway. Note that these 4 reactors are currently shut down, and it hasn't impacted

1. Yes, when the government mandates that something MUST be privatized the result is that companies take advantage of the government requirement, especially when there is essentially no competition. Its like a tax auction, you don't walk in with a high bid, you start with the absolute lowest possible one you can. Would you rather pay %50 of the price of your next car, or sticker price plus $20k?

2. They shut down 4 reactors and there is no perceivable impact and none expected for any time in the near futu

"The reactor problems highlight that most of Britain’s nuclear installations, which generate about 20 percent of the country’s electricity, are approaching the end of their lives. The four EDF reactors under investigation were commissioned in 1983 and are officially scheduled to be removed from service in 2019.
EDF Energy had been expected to seek extensions to the lives of the plants, but if the problems turn out to be too expensive to be worth fixing, then they might end up being permanently closed sooner than expected.
“If this fault is as a result of the aging of the unit, this has potential implications for the operational life of these four units and, potentially, others as well,” said Antony Froggatt, a nuclear analyst at Chatham House, a London research organization."

It's things like this that are the answer to the "just build a standard reactor everywhere and have an economy of scale" folks. The other answer is that since nuclear power, more than all other alternative energies, is still in a process of improvement so it makes little sense to have a fifteen year plan to build a lot of identical reactors when there could be a vast improvement in ten years.

Although the story link in your summary seems factually correct, the slashdot summary is qute wrong.

EDF Energy as a whole supplies 25% of the UK's energy needs (57.5 GW peak in 2012) with 16 nuclear reactors (about 9.9 GW of capicity) and 7 conventional coal and gas turbines (3,4 GW of capacity) and various renewable energy sources with about 1,5GW of capacity. Of the 16 reactors, 1 is a pressurised water reactor (PWR) and 15 are avanced gas reactors (AGR) and four of these AGRs are of the same design as Dungeness B with the faulty boiler pump. There are only 4 of those reactors offline and only 3 of which are offline for unscheduled maintenance and the other twelve are still running. Just because EDf Energy has 15 AGRs it doesn't mean that all 15 have the same boiler pumps as Dungeness B. Dungeness B has been shut down since june due to a pump failure and two other reactors were shutdown for an inspection of similar pumps. The fourth reactor currently shutdown (Heysham 1) is in a scheduled outage and Hartepool 1 pumps will be inspected in a schedue outage later this month.

You can see the current status of EDF Energies AGR reactors

http://www.edfenergy.com/energy/power-station/daily-statuses

or

http://www.edfenergy.com/energy

So the real impact of this problem is in fact only three reactors offline that should have been functional with a capicity of about 1,6 GW. As ratio of EDF energies total production capicity of 14,8 GW this is 12% of their capacity of 3% of the UKs total energy production capacity. As its summer the energy needs of the UK are in fact reduced and most scheduled outages of nuclear reactors in Europe and performed in this period are this reason, so a 3% loss of capacity in summer is frankly nothing.

I am really surprised that Britain continued to use graphite moderators in their power reactors. the Wigner effect of neutron poisoning in the moderator was very well known going into the 50s, making those reactors somewhat unpredictable. after Windscale, they should have known better.